'Doom': A personal retrospective
Id Software, the video game developer behind Doom, announced Thursday that it has tapped British author Graham Joyce to write Doom 4. The fantasy novelist has won numerous awards for many of his 14 novels and 26 short stories.
"I can say that Id has hired me to help develop the storyline potential," Joyce said in an interview with CVG. He chose not to offer any more comments about the pending release of Doom 4.
Regardless, I'm looking forward to Doom 4 even though Id first announced the game back in 2007 and has made no mention of it since. The original Doom became an iconic franchise that helped start this whole anti- video-game-violence nonsense, but more importantly, it set the tone for gaming today. It brought first-person shooters to the mainstream and left an indelible mark on the entire industry.
Doom was an important part of my formative years, as well. Maybe that's why my love for Doom, even through rough patches (I'm looking at you, Doom 3), has ever diminished.
Remember when Doom first hit store shelves in 1993? It wasn't like any other game on the market. It included off-color remarks, a gun named BFG (the "F" stood for... you can guess that yourself), and unprecedented violence. Unfortunately, it was that violence that got all the media attention.
But for the rest of us, Doom was something special. It was the graphical king of its time and we marveled at Id's ability to bring it to life. More importantly, it led to the 1990s gaming boom that changed the industry (and its consumers) forever.
Remember the "BAM!" sound the BFG shot would make at impact on a weak enemy? That was well worth the cost of the game. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who whipped the chainsaw out at inopportune moments just to see how many enemies I could saw to death before I was taken out.
Oh, and the story? Barely there. Didn't matter.
Then gaming passed Doom by. Although it still lives on in halls of Congress whenever someone needs to make a point about violence and video games, Doom is but a relic of our past. Sure, we've been invited back to hell a couple times over the past decade and most of us have jumped in with both feet, but as computer gaming got bigger, Doom was forgotten, especially by younger gamers nurtured by Halo and Madden.
Perhaps that's why I'm so excited for Doom 4 and the fact that Id is finally hiring a real writer to shape the story. It's not that I need a better story or that I want something different. It's that, for the first time, Doom, gaming's once-dominant franchise, may be able to overshadow its successors and introduce a whole new generation of gamers to its bizarre world.
When will Doom 4 hit store shelves? Id Software isn't saying. But I'm sure I speak for thousands in saying that time doesn't matter. We just want our Doom back whenever it's ready.
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Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
It was the madness of lots of enemies coming at you at once.
At first you just died and died and died, but as you got better, you learned to fight these mindless and mad mobs of hell creatures. Nowadays, games are one or a few enemies at a time in order to be more realistic and to satisfy the limits of graphic capability. But Doom was set in hell so lost souls and demons don't fight one at a time do they? The other thing I liked was it's futuristic looking levels. This game was definitely the future and the ability to build new levels and play thousands of others was one of the big draw cards. I still have an old 386 laptop at home just for playing Doom and some of the levels I created back in the 90s.
I'd like to see Doom 4 kick a$$.
- by FpLiOnYkD January 16, 2009 5:14 PM PST
- I recently purchased the Doom 2 download on Steam for $4.99. I had longed to play it for years (bought it in 1994) but the version I had was so old it couldn't run on any of my Windows XP PC's, and I was too lazy to figure out how to make it work. Ah, the memories it brought back. Doom 2 was the first game I was truly addicted to--playing 6 hours straight with nary a potty break and wondering what happened to the time; getting to level 23 on "Hurt Me Plenty" difficulty and then deciding to start all over on "Ultra-Violence" mode; swapping war stories with fellow Doomers at work; getting absolutely terrified whenever an imp or revenant would scream when you stumbled upon it--it truly was a wondrous time. Sure felt good to play it again!
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